President Donald Trump’s and his administration love to dehumanize transgender people under the guise of “protecting women.”

It’s an ignorant and bigoted lie. One need only glance at the myriad things Trump and Co. have done to defund programs across the country that might actually protect women to see how transgender youth and adults are being used as a culture-war cudgel. Their very existence is tossed like red meat to a right-wing base hungry for cruelty against people they won’t bother to understand.

The anti-trans fury often involves the issue of transgender athletes, an almost-impossibly small sliver of people in America. 

When he signed a February executive order banning transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports, Trump amped up the drama: “Under the Trump administration, we will defend the proud tradition of female athletes, and we will not allow men to beat up, injure and cheat our women and our girls.”

I’ll quickly point out that under this same disingenuous president, the Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women has stripped its website of funding opportunities, instructing people to “not finalize any applications.”

When Attorney General Pam Bondi recently announced a Justice Department lawsuit against Maine's Department of Education for not following the........

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